Health officials in California are now telling residents not to worry after a video uploaded to the internet last month seemed to show high levels of radiation at a Pacific Coast beach.

The video, “Fukushima radiation hits San Francisco,” has been
viewed nearly half-a-million times since being uploaded to
YouTube on Christmas Eve, and its contents have caused concern
among residents who fear that nuclear waste from the March 2011
disaster in Japan may be arriving on their side of the Pacific
Ocean.

Throughout the course of the seven-minute-long clip, a man tests
out his Geiger counter radiation detector while walking through
Pacifica State Beach outside of San Francisco. At times, the
monitor on the machine seems to show radiation of 150
counts-per-minute, or the equivalent of around five times what is
typically found in that type of environment.

After the video began to go viral last month, local, state and
federal officials began to investigate claims that waste from the
Fukushima nuclear plant has washed ashore in California. Only
now, though, are authorities saying that they have no reason to
believe that conditions along the West Coast are unsafe.

The Half Moon Bay Review
reported on Friday that government officials conducted tests
along California’s Pacific Coast after word of the video began to
spread online, but found no indication that radiation levels had
reached a hazardous point.

“It’s not something that we feel is an immediate public
health concern,” Dean Peterson, the county environmental
health director, told the Review. “We’re not even close to
the point of saying that any of this is from Fukushima.”

According to the Review’s Mark Noack, counts-per-minute does
indeed measure radiation, but “does not directly equate to
the strength or its hazard level to humans.” And while the
paper has reported that testing conducted by Peterson’s
department on their own Geiger counters has since
revealedradiation level of about 100 micro-REM per hour, or about
five times the normal amount, officials are confident that there
is nothing to be concerned about.

“Although the radiation levels were clearly higher than is
typical, Peterson emphasized that it was still not unsafe for
humans,” Noack wrote. “A person would need to be exposed
to 100 microREMs of radiation for 50,000 hours before it
surpassed safety guidelines by the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, he explained.”

Even so, officials are still uncertain as to why those levels —
even if they are relatively safe — seem to be five-times higher
than what is expected. Peterson told the Review he was
“befuddled” over the ordeal, but suggested the culprit
could be something not too sinister — such as red-painted eating
utensils buried on the beach.

“I honestly think the end result of this is that it’s just
higher levels of background radiation,” he said.

Researchers at the Geiger Counter Bulletin website have since
tried to make sense of the reading on their own, and agree that
the levels being detected are several times over what should be
expected. According to a post on their website from this weekend,
however, an independent testing of soil taken from near Pacifica
State Beach tested positive for some radioactive material — but
nothing that would have come from Fukushima.

The results of testing conducted by California’s Department of
Public Health are expected to be announced later this week.